Q&A | Jayshree Gupta | Commercial

[Music] My name is J. Shri Gupta. I’m a dualqualified solicister based in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Dubai seems like it’s the center of the world at the moment. So, I don’t need to tell people where I am anymore, like a few years ago when I had to explain to them that I didn’t live in Saudi Arabia. But anyway, my law firm is called the in-house company, which shortens to think. and we are effectively a full-ervice law firm. We do corporate commercial stuff. We do real estate. We

offer a lot of litigation support on corporate deals. So we do mergers and acquisitions, franchising, licensing, and significant amount of hospitality and hotel real estate. we do offer also employment services and we support on many other corporate aspects of deals, you know, drafting resolutions, setting up companies, corporate governance and all that kind of thing.

So really, I would say we call ourselves the in-house company for a reason. And I know that’s probably the next question, so I’ll wait for it. [Music] the reason is I spent about 25 years in very very big in fact three of the world’s largest US law firms and one of the things I felt is that clients needs are changing as we modernize our approach to law. Number one they want a closer to council approach. So, I wanted to be either an extension of their

in-house team or effectively the person they go to and their super trusted advisor for everything. and therefore I thought the in-house would have a good ring to it. so that’s really our ethos. Let’s be as close to the client as possible. Let’s give them commercial practical advice. And we position ourselves as Middle East experts. So really what we do we are very good at and I’ve lived and worked in the region for over 30 years [Music] now. I worked for major US law firms and

many of their Middle East practices or Middle East companies subsidiaries ended up working with me when I set up my own law firm. So we have a range of UAE based very old families who have grown their businesses in the region. We have Saudi Arabian clients who you know I love to work with because they always take my advice very seriously which is wonderful. And we have a host of European clients because we do a lot of work in the luxury and

fashion and perfume sector. So there’s a lot of European you know like French, Italian, German clients and there’s a bunch of US clients we work for primarily in the oil and gas space and then there’s a bit of government work and also law firms who instruct us because one of the features of the firm is we are an independent law firm. So we are not really linked with anybody. So a lot of law firms you know feel very comfortable working with us on their

clients. [Music] The ones that really stands out for me is under civil law, which is the law that’s practiced in the UAE, civil and codified law. there is a provision that allows for verbal contracts. but I was lucky to be involved in a case where there was a verbal contract made on a private jet when the parties were traveling from the UAE to a pilgrimage. Ironically, however, the verbal agreement was broken and there was an issue obviously of enforcing this verbal agreement and I

was really lucky to be instructed and worked on a case where it was really the first case of enforcement of a verbal agreement. So, I would say in a lot of funky and amazing things that I’ve done and clients I’ve worked with and cases I’ve done including class action litigation when I was in a big law firm you know for camel jockeyies and things like that. a verbal agreement case was extremely interesting and it was really cool to see how the court’s thought process worked. so I would

probably highlight [Music] that. it’s all about our network and our connections. The reason why I’m a practitioner who’s well known in the region is partially yes I know the law and everybody knows I know the law but they also know about my connections my ability to introduce people to other law firms accountancy firms, corporate service providers, a tax which is a growing area in the UAE now that we have corporate tax. So really I think GLE is a great foundation for meeting other like-minded professionals in so many

different spheres of the law and in so many geographical jurisdictions because now every deal we do has a cross-border element to it. So I cannot even emphasize the value of a network like GLE honestly. [Music]